The Autodromo Nazionale Monza is a race track located near the city of Monza, north of Milan, in Italy. The circuit’s biggest event is the Formula One Italian Grand Prix, which has been hosted there since the sport’s inception.[4]

Built in the Royal Villa of Monza park in a woodland setting,[5] the site has three tracks – the 5.793 kilometres (3.600 mi) Grand Prix track,[2] the 2.405 kilometres (1.494 mi) Junior track,[3] and a 4.250 kilometres (2.641 mi) high speed oval track with steep bankings which has been unused for many decades and is now decaying.[4] The major features of the main Grand Prix track include the Curva Grande, the Curva di Lesmo, the Variante Ascari and the Curva Parabolica. The high speed curve, Curva Grande, is located after the Variante del Rettifilo which is located at the end of the front straight or Rettifilo Tribune, and is usually taken flat out by Formula One cars.

Drivers are on full throttle for most of the lap due to its long straights and fast corners, and is usually the scenario in which the open-wheeled F1 cars show the raw speed they are capable of (372 kilometres per hour (231 mph) during the mid-2000s V10 engine formula, although in 2012 with the 2.4L V8 engines, top speeds in F1 rarely reach over 340 kilometres per hour (211 mph)). The circuit is generally flat, but has a gradual gradient from the second Lesmos to the Variante Ascari. Due to the low aerodynamic profile needed, with its resulting low downforce,[6] the grip is very low; understeer is a more serious issue than at other circuits; however, the opposite effect, oversteer, is also present in the second sector, requiring the use of a very distinctive opposite lock technique. Since both maximum power, and minimal drag is the key for speed on the straights, only competitors with enough power or aerodynamic efficiency at their disposal are able to challenge for the top places.[6]

In addition to Formula One, the circuit hosts an endurance event, the 1000 km Monza, which has been run as part of the World Sportscar Championship and the Le Mans Series. Monza also featured the unique Race of Two Worlds events, which attempted to run Formula One and United States Auto Club National Championship cars against each other, and previously held rounds of Grand Prix motorcycle racing, in the Italian motorcycle Grand Prix. Current major events are races of the World Touring Car Championship and the Superbike World Championship, as well as various local championship races

Built in the Royal Villa of Monza park in a woodland setting,[5] the site has three tracks – the 5.793 kilometres (3.600 mi) Grand Prix track,[2] the 2.405 kilometres (1.494 mi) Junior track,[3] and a 4.250 kilometres (2.641 mi) high speed oval track with steep bankings which has been unused for many decades and is now decaying.[4] The major features of the main Grand Prix track include the Curva Grande, the Curva di Lesmo, the Variante Ascari and the Curva Parabolica. The high speed curve, Curva Grande, is located after the Variante del Rettifilo which is located at the end of the front straight or Rettifilo Tribune, and is usually taken flat out by Formula One cars.

Drivers are on full throttle for most of the lap due to its long straights and fast corners, and is usually the scenario in which the open-wheeled F1 cars show the raw speed they are capable of (372 kilometres per hour (231 mph) during the mid-2000s V10 engine formula, although in 2012 with the 2.4L V8 engines, top speeds in F1 rarely reach over 340 kilometres per hour (211 mph)). The circuit is generally flat, but has a gradual gradient from the second Lesmos to the Variante Ascari. Due to the low aerodynamic profile needed, with its resulting low downforce,[6] the grip is very low; understeer is a more serious issue than at other circuits; however, the opposite effect, oversteer, is also present in the second sector, requiring the use of a very distinctive opposite lock technique. Since both maximum power, and minimal drag is the key for speed on the straights, only competitors with enough power or aerodynamic efficiency at their disposal are able to challenge for the top places.[6]

English: Jack Dorsey and Barack Obama at Twitter Town Hall in July 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I’ve already written here, it’s natural that companies go into entrenchment mode when they need to switch from growth stage to monetization stage. Twitter is no exception. It was nice to have an awesome communications and messaging platform that many developers could use to build their apps on. Ecosystem has created many different apps for use-cases both on consumption and on content creation side.

But now the game has changed and this is not an amateur league anymore. Twitter needs an IPO and in order to make that omelet it is more than willing to break some eggs.

Unfortunately it will take at least a few years for anything competitive to emerge. And I am sure it will offer a different paradigm than Twitter does today.

With Twitter’s recent moves pointing toward “media company,” there is a growing concern among technologists that a trend for greater content control will compromise both innovation and Twitter’s future in favor of short-term profits.

Unfortunately I don’t think there is an alternative to Twitter. No service that would be exactly like Twitter (think Identi.ca) would be able to rouse enough users to be viable alternative.

What is need is a different service that would be able to start pulling air out of Twitter ecosystem. And right now there doesn’t seem to be any contender. When it will come it will look so different to Twitter, we won’t even know.

Lately I’ve been looking at Pair and Avocado. Those are services for couples to keep in touch. They use well known ‘communication language’ of short messages and images which we’ve learned while texting and tweeting. The use case is much narrower which offers opportunity for innovation (Pair’s finger-kissing for example). Maybe those are the services where innovation needed to disrupt Facebook and Twitter will come from.

As Twitter strives to become a more lucrative business, it is arguably getting less consumer and developer friendly. The introduction of “Promoted Tweets” and the growing crackdown of how its API can be used by third-parties are indications how Twitter operates is changing.

I am a believer in local copy of all emails (and still having a cloud option!). Call me old-fashioned if you will. Since I often work on emails offline (on planes or in foreign countries where I don’t have unlimited data plan), it comes really handy. It seems I’ll have to find a new client that will cope with my 8Gb mail archive. But not sooner than in a few years, and who knows what happens till then.

Mozilla is cutting development on ThunderBird. And where’s Chandler when you need it? Seriously though, it’s probably an inevitable move from Mozilla. Desktop email clients that look like Outlook are a legacy product. And Mozilla has to husband its scarce resources very carefully these days.

We’ve come to another stage in history of social platforms. Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr seem to have achieved their growth goals and now we are going into a phase that I shall call “entrenchment”. Basically every network will try to control user experience in a vertical way as much as possible and thus “own” the user and user experience. Vertical control is a requirement for ‘safe’ delivery of ads and other business opportunities. Today this means making sure the companies control client software and that they control user experience. Killing RSS and killing third party clients are just parts of this game.

After control of users will be complete, the main “exploitation” stage of social networking will start. That one will last until these networks get disrupted by next big thing. And then the cycle will repeat.

Tech Talk (Credit: Twitter/LinkedIn) (CBS News) Twitter, the micro-blogging site, has cut off tweets on the professional social network LinkedIn, ending a two-year partnership. Twitter is a website that lets users broadcast 140-character status updates, or tweets, in real time.

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Here’s an interesting thought: is being listed on Facebok a human right? Internet access already is a human right in some countries such as Estonia, Spain and Finland. Could it be that if Facebook dominance over our social status continues for next decade or two Facebook profile itself becomes a human right? The question sounds weird right now, but imagine if being on Facebook basically starts constituting your exclusive “online passport”?

Europe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1991 in Slovenia there was an administrative erasure of about 20k people. They were deprived of their residency status and through that of their basic rights. Now The Erased have won a major court victory at European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg entitling them to reparations. Is it just a matter of time when similar cases are going to be fought around social network accounts?

Diana Frerick felt as if her heart had stopped on Valentine’s Day of this year when Facebook pulled the plug on her profile page. The former Cedar Rapids resident, who now lives in Phoenix, Ariz., was one of many Facebook users who have mixed a healthy dash of business with social networking.